Bill Fischer and Simone Cicero on Haier and the entrepreneurial organisation

Lisa: Thank you first of all to both of you for being on the Leadermorphosis podcast. I’m really looking forward to talking to you. I’ve been following the example of Haier with quite a lot of fascination over the last few years, so it’s really fun to get the opportunity to talk to two people who have been sort of immersed in the Haier world, at least for the last few years. But I know Bill that you’ve also known Haier and Zhang Ruimin for several decades now, so 1997 I think we decided we first met, but I was living close by when they started the smash the refrigerators in ‘82. So I’ve followed the story since then.

Simone: The noise… Sorry, you could almost hear the noise of the smash.

Lisa: Yeah, I love that story. I’m wondering if for the benefit of the listeners, can you share that story about smashing the refrigerators briefly?

Lisa: So you want me to start, Simone?

Simone: Oh no, please go ahead Bill. You know much more than me about that part.

Bill: In 1982, I believe it was, a customer around this time a young fellow by the name of Zhang Ruimin had moved from the Light Industry Bureau within the Qingdao government to take over the general management position at what was called Qingdao Refrigerator. The reason he moved was because they couldn’t find anybody who wanted to run the organization. It was in such terrible shape. And Zhang Ruimin had these dreams, and you know, it’s interesting because we have often criticized bureaucrats for being unimaginative, but in this case, the bureaucrat had all the dreams.

His dreams were that if the Chinese economic reforms were to continue the way they had started out, he felt that the Chinese customer would be much more sophisticated in a very short period of time and would be looking for high-quality products. Just about that point in time, a customer bought a refrigerator that didn’t work, brought it back, was angry, and Zhang Ruimin went to the finished goods inventory and discovered that 20% of the finished goods didn’t work.

So Zhang Ruimin wanted to send a message to the workforce that this was unacceptable. So he took 76 of these refrigerators that were damaged, put them in the street, bought 76 sledgehammers, had 76 workers who had built these refrigerators, and told them to destroy them. And to be fair, most of the people in the story thought this was insane because even though the refrigerators didn’t work, they were perfectly sellable. People would buy them because they could get them fixed. So quality might not be a great differentiator at that time in China, but there was a wonderful fix-it community that could change anything.

That was the beginning. That was the beginning of Haier’s commitment to thinking further and bigger than the rest of the people in the industry and very dramatic. Today when I go back to China and talk to people my age who recall that sort of event, absolutely everybody remembers it. It was “where were you when they smashed the refrigerator?” So it’s kind of a story about how to make a vision vivid.

Lisa: Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s such an iconic story, and it’s remarkable that here we are in 2020, and this RenDanHeYi model is sort of the talk of the town. Everyone’s really intrigued with this new structure, and so it seems like Haier is the latest kind of poster child for new ways of working and this kind of decentralized organization, et cetera, et cetera. Buzzwords - you can throw them all at Haier, I think.

So I’m curious, to both of you, what is the most interesting thing about Haier? Because there’s so much we could say, but what do you think of the real kind of unique or interesting aspects?

Simone: Well, it’s hard to just talk about one thing. For me personally, I think Haier is special probably because of the leadership that it has, not just when you compare it with other traditional Western organizations, but also in China. So it’s really a special organization.

For me, I think there is a unique way and unique culture that has this unique mix of thinking that Zhang Ruimin could put together. It’s like a patchwork of great ideas and strong approaches to work and life and everything that makes this crazy unique culture.

For example, it’s a great mix of one of the most interesting and important management thinkers from the West like Peter Drucker. You know that Zhang Ruimin is such a big fan of Drucker’s work, but not just Drucker’s work. Zhang Ruimin takes from Western thinking, from modern management theory, but also from the Greeks. It’s not uncommon that when you are there, he quotes tales or the Delos Oracle.

On the other hand, it’s really, I think, one of the few companies in China that is really attached to a very strong Taoist approach to thinking about work and life and engaging with the world basically. And I think this is specific because normally Chinese companies are very much more focused on a more traditional Confucian thinking from what we understood.

I’m very fascinated in general by Taoist thinking because it’s really post-modern to some extent. There are a lot of parallels between postmodern thinking in Europe and in the West and the Taoist perspective. The difference is that maybe post-modernity as some people would recognize it here in Europe or in the West, for example relating it to the work of philosophers such as Deleuze, it ends up in a social dimension. It’s really about how we create social networking in this society that we created - the societies of control, for example, for those who know a little bit of Deleuze’s work. It’s a society based on how we interact basically - it’s really a matter of numbers that interact with each other.

Instead, the Taoist perspective is really individual, is focused on the individual, and it’s really about how we engage with such a complex world that goes beyond our capacity to understand it. And I think when you relate to this powerful mix of individual capabilities, and for example the work that Peter Drucker has been doing in focusing on the individual and his capability, and this perspective, this kind of post-modern perspective that the Taoist thinking brings to you, you end up with this kind of crazy entrepreneurial culture. And this is really unique.

I think from my understanding, it is not present in any other organization that I’ve been able to engage with. It’s really unique. You can engage with them and you will see that they always refer, for example, if there is a colleague that didn’t perform well on a project, there is always this reference of, “This person will find its way, will find his way to a new place where he can show his capabilities fully, where he can express his human capabilities fully.” And I think this is very powerful.

Lisa: And what about you, Bill?

Bill: I’ve always been fascinated that when people talk about the exciting firms of China’s future, it’s always the same collection. It’s Alibaba, it’s Huawei, it’s Xiaomi, perhaps Lenovo, and Haier. And the other four are high-tech, new economy companies. They’re very exciting. And Haier is an old economy, home appliance manufacturer, commodity industry, mature, and yet what’s going on there is extraordinary.

So when we talk about innovation, we tend to talk about… we tend to pay lip service to product and process and service and business model innovation. And here’s Haier off on the side doing really organizational innovation on a consistent basis as a differentiator.

For me, that’s what’s interesting. I teach at a business school where most of the participants who come to our programs - it’s IMD in Lausanne - where most of the participants who come to our programs are managers from mature, old, relatively old economy industries, and they’re looking for an answer. And what the popular management market tries to give them is often, you know, kids running around in Silicon Valley in flip-flops. And that’s not the reality that they’re going to face when they go back.

But Haier is 70,000 real people making real things. And so for me, it’s a wonderful opportunity to talk about how do you change large, complex organizations, mature industries. And the leadership, of course, is extraordinary. So those two things, I think, are what differentiate it.

Lisa: Thank you. Let’s talk a little bit about the leadership then because I mean, Zhang Ruimin’s kind of legacy already at Haier, 35 years also I think he’s been in the organization. And this is now the sixth evolution, reinvention really, of the organization. And as you said, it’s kind of an old economy organization. So it takes a very unique kind of leader, I think, to navigate that.

I’ve read and heard about him being this incredibly well-read person, talking about philosophers, Hesay and everything. But he also strikes me, from just the videos that I’ve seen - and I know both of you have met him and spent quite a bit of time with him - but he strikes me as also quite a humble person. He talks about really having faith in people who are closest to the market and relating to their potential, and that’s really what the whole kind of organization is built on.

So I’m curious what your thoughts are about Zhang Ruimin and how he as a CEO is able to hold the space for this organization to evolve and to be the way that it is, which is really quite radical in comparison to most large-scale organizations we know today.

Bill: I think that he’s unique. I think that I have never met another CEO who compares to him in both his intellectual curiosity and, I think, determination. I think he has a simple vision with two elements that have driven all this change over all this time. One is the need to provide a better customer experience, and the second is a faith that his employees know a lot. And if he could release that knowledge and their energies, their innate entrepreneurial energies, the organization could really take off.

We talked about six incarnations, at least, depending on how you count them, but I think it’s been one story. It’s just different chapters in how you fulfill those two meta objectives. And I think that what’s so interesting about Zhang Ruimin is that he is consumed by this curiosity. So every time you go to see him, he’s just met everybody you’re reading now, he knows them. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of Haier accessing fresh insights and then testing them, putting them to work right away.

Simone: I think one thing that I can just add on top of this is that he’s really a humble leader. It’s really a person that… I’ve met him a few times when I was there and in this live interview. You can spot, you can smell how much he is interested in knowing and engaging with playing new ideas. I think it’s clear that this is the most important thing for him. It’s really about knowing about the work of others and engaging with ideas. He’s really there to engage with ideas, and he’s not there to make more money or to exercise more power.

It feels like when you’re there, it feels like he would prefer to be there reading books instead of managing a company. So I think this kind of cultural approach has been put down inside of the organization.

When I was there with Bill at the Drucker Forum, we had this leader, Mr. Wu if I’m not wrong, who is the leader of the Internet of Food project. It’s a huge platform connecting thousands of enterprises and creating these vibrant product solutions to get people with fridges that are connected with recipe creators or organic producers and so on. When we were on stage, lots of people were there trying to showcase their projects. But at the end of the day, this guy came up on the stage, and the first thing he did was refer to the work of Peter Drucker. He was the first one actually during the Drucker Forum to refer directly to Peter Drucker’s work.

This shows me that you have these curious leaders, these leaders who are really humble and really there to engage. When you become a humble leader, you are empowered; there’s no other way because you understand that it’s not about you. It’s about all the other people that engage in the management and the execution of the business vision. So you tend to create this culture of having everybody at the same level, especially when everybody can engage with knowledge. When knowledge, ideas, and conversation become the most important thing, then everybody is at the same level. Everybody can be smart, everybody can engage with smart ideas, everybody can fight their best to embody this wise thinking in managing the business.

So it’s not about you. It’s much more about the ideas that we share, it’s much more about the books that we read, and it’s much more about the conversations that we have than your personal contribution. And I think you can recognize this because at the same time, you have these teams that are so engaged with their leaders and with the leader most of all, of course, Zhang Ruimin. Everybody respects him, and everybody - you can spot it when he’s around, everybody’s kind of in this frenzy to… it’s really like that.

But at the same time, when you have an interview and you read people saying, “What happens when Zhang Ruimin will leave the company?” They will candidly say, “That’s no problem, somebody else will find his way to lead this organization.” It’s not about Zhang Ruimin. At the same time, it’s about these ideas that we are all in the same space, we can engage with ideas, we can have this passion to discover all together. So I think this is really remarkable.

Lisa: I’m curious as well about - because of course, there’s always a danger that we romanticize Zhang Ruimin and kind of put him in the same camp of the sort of slightly outdated, heroic archetype of a leader, this real visionary person. It’s like, they’re responsible solely for the success and so on.

But he has this lovely phrase about creating a system where everyone can be a CEO of themself. And I’m interested in what your experience is of leadership more generally in Haier and how leadership emerges. What does leadership look like elsewhere in the organization? How is leadership encouraged? What does that look like? Do they have leadership training, or is it you design a system and leadership emerges? I’m kind of curious to know about that.

Simone: Well, I will just start so we can break this flow of Bill first and then me, so we can have a more open conversation. But I think there is an interesting aspect, which is the constrained definition. There’s a lot of leadership in Haier that goes through these architectural aspects. So for example, I think a lot of Zhang Ruimin’s actual leadership is organizational design leadership. He has been designing the constraints together with his board members, I think, during the years so that this leadership can really flourish in the organization.

For example, when you say you just need three colleagues to create an enterprise, and then when you decide, for example, your basic income is really basic, so you need to be entrepreneurial to really have a decent amount of money, but you can get more because if you are really entrepreneurial, you can make lots of money. So you kind of architect a certain kind of attraction for the participants in your organization. You kind of create the culture by designing these constraints. And this is something that is quite recurring, I think, when you deal with really complex organizations. They are mostly managed by constraints.

This is an expression of complexity in general. When you need to manage a complex system, you need to work by setting constraints so that you can flourish within certain directions that don’t, for example, create asymmetric risks or undermine the environment of the organization. So I think this is really one clear and key aspect of the system.

Bill: What I think is that everybody wants bottom-up type of innovation because we feel that there’s more energy, and people are closer to the customer. And I agree with that. But what I’ve seen in so many organizations is that unless you have a very self-secure, self-confident, courageous top management, you’re not going to get that. Because it’s only a visionary, self-confident top management that can unleash bottom-up suggestions and not take them as threats.

So I think in a sense, Zhang Ruimin really plays that role very well because he is self-confident, and he certainly has a lot of power within the organization. I think he’s used that power, as Simone says, to build an organizational architecture style that really expects people to step into the entrepreneurial void at the front line with the customer and fill it.

I remember some years ago when there was a period where Haier was releasing control to people within the organization, and it was called “de-Haier-ing”, which is kind of… I remember that there were people celebrating being “de-Haier-ed” because they were, in fact, taking over their own destiny. I had dinner that very night with Zhang Ruimin, and I asked him how he felt about that. It was a very human response. He said, “You know, of course, we worked hard together, we’re colleagues, we built this organization, and you sort of hate to see these people go off, and certainly celebrating that they’re going off.”

He said, “But that’s what we set out to accomplish, right from the start. We set out to free up the energies and knowledge within, to fulfill the talent potential of the organization. And if it means people taking control of their destiny and heading off on their own, so be it. That was the goal.”

And I was struck by both the sentimental quality in the way in which he was expressing himself, but also the commitment to this ideal, which is an ideal that I think we should all be associated with. And that is freeing up the potential of people in large, complex organizations and small, not-so-complex organizations as well.

Lisa: I’m really curious about… My background, obviously my bias is that I come from a training background, and so I’m always curious in the kind of human relational aspects and what is the kind of mindset that’s needed for this way of working to thrive, especially if you’re a manager or a top manager, middle manager.

Often when there’s a transformation in an organization, like Zappos or these organizations that transform into something more decentralized, it can be very difficult for former managers to make that shift, to kind of unlearn that conditioning of being responsible, solving problems for other people, making decisions, not being transparent, and so on.

I’m curious what that journey has been like for managers or former managers and this sort of top management, as you say. Because yeah, if the top management, even if Zhang Ruimin is the kind of progressive leader he is, if he has a CEO or someone else in the top management team who’s a commercial control bureaucrat, then it’s not going to work, right?

So I’m curious if there was - and I know that it’s been, as you say, a continuous journey, so perhaps it’s not so clear-cut that they went from one state of affairs to the other - but what has that journey been like, do you think? And how are people supported in terms of those kinds of skills? Or is the system designed so that it’s self-correcting? You know, if you’re a kind of autocratic, boss-like character, no one will want to be in your micro-enterprise, and maybe it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly. I don’t know how that works.

Bill: Can I start, Simone?

Simone: Okay.

Bill: So I think that you can characterize the journey by being continuous, right? Because it’s not been episodic, it’s not been… it’s been quite a continuous period of change, a lot of experimentation. They don’t always get it right, and sometimes they embark on visions that people are wondering, “How are we ever going to do this?” They figure it out as they go along.

I think that it has been a blend of the new and the old. So I think that there’s always been familiar pieces in the changes. At no time has Haier ever asked its employees to take a flying leap into the unknown. There’s always been… often they’re still using the same performance management system they used 35 or 40 years ago. It’s been adapted and adjusted and digitalized and all that sort of stuff, but it’s still the same system. So it’s not like you’re being surprised by outside and inside.

The change has always been contextually driven. It’s always been outside-in in terms of its origins, even though the responses sometimes in the early days were not. But it was always about what was going on around us rather than what we were doing ourselves. Simone, let me start?

Simone: Well, I mean, you know much better than me the story of the existing management structures, how they have been liquefied into the new ones. But for what I can say from being in touch mostly with people that have been hired lately, I would say I see that there is now such a strong culture that it’s impossible that you end up working for Haier with a hierarchical control perspective. It’s mathematically impossible you would be hired. You won’t be actually attracted because the employer branding that they created is so characterized that people just don’t end up working there.

The people that end up working there, it’s like a special fit for their culture. It’s entrepreneurial people. And I always say that one of the challenges of the organization of the future is really about finding a way to attract entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurs will be able to do enterprise outside of the organization. Everybody knows that now - the potential of individuals and small teams is skyrocketing respected to the past.

And now the question is really about, as an organization, as a brand, how do I make the case for these kind of people to work for us, to work for this organization? And I think they have succeeded to some extent to create this attractive magnet for that kind of people. There is going to be a challenge for most of the organizations that I think we will have in the future.

Bill: I think that after about 35 years, the people who hate change are no longer there for the most part, right? So this is a huge advantage because I really do believe people come to work at Haier thinking, “What can I do today that would be a small innovation in the way in which we work or change, or how can I drive this venture forward?” They think of… I don’t want you to think of them as all altruistic thinkers, but they’re thinking about, “What can I do that will help advance what I’m doing?”

And collectively, the organization moves forward. And now, as Simone says, they have an employer brand that’s quite powerful. So that’s a huge advantage to have that, and that’s only because they’ve consistently and persistently pursued the same dreams for a long time.

Simone: I think the pressure that they put on the individual is really huge. It’s a company for leaders essentially. It’s a company for… It resonated with Peter Drucker - you mentioned this idea of being “guaranteed yourself.” That’s not really Zhang Ruimin’s word, but it’s Peter Drucker’s word that Zhang Ruimin actually repeats all the time.

I think it’s really about that. It’s a company where individuals are on the forefront all the time, and all the challenges are always described in very much detail. So for example, if you create a company, at the moment of your creation, you need to commit to goals, you need to commit to tangible results.

Working in Haier is never passive. You always respond to what they call… you create what they call a “bid” for an “order.” So there is an order, you bid for that. And when you bid for this order, at every level of the organization, as an employee that wants to join a micro-enterprise, as a micro-enterprise representative that wants to join an ecosystem micro-community, you always need to commit yourself to delivering above-average results. And you always need to commit yourself to tangible outputs.

So at the end of the day, it’s a company where you need to be able to be consistent. You need to be able to put yourself, put your skin into the game. And it’s always about zero - everything is written down. So I think this is really a characteristic that is unique of their own cultural code, so it’s really a code of operation.

Lisa: And talking about cultural code, it’s interesting now that Haier is acquiring new businesses. And I believe you’re supporting in sort of teaching the cultural code, so to speak, to some of the people who are in the European part of the Haier business now.

I think back to when the Americans went over to study Toyota and what they were doing with lean, and kind of took it back and followed the recipe, but it didn’t quite work because something was missing in terms of the kind of cultural nuance, I think, of really kind of pushing authority down to the front line.

So I’m curious what perhaps what you’re experiencing already, or what your hypothesis might be about, are there pieces of this cultural code, of this way of organizing, that might be challenging for people in Europe, for example, to really get? I’m thinking about what you were saying earlier as well about Taoism and how that’s influenced this kind of mindset, if you like.

Bill: I will let you go first this time.

Simone: So what I think Haier has done is, as it’s moved towards hiring more entrepreneurial workers - and that didn’t start at the beginning. At the beginning, they basically needed to get people disciplined. But then at some point, they began to need… the way in which they were going to interact with the marketplace with this zero distance with the customers required that there’s no point in putting people at zero distance to the customers if you don’t trust them to make decisions.

So they really needed to rethink what the talent skills were that were needed. And I think what they saw was that they needed people who were entrepreneurs essentially - people who were willing to take chances and move fast and listen to what’s going on around them. And then once they did that, they needed to build an organization, or rebuild the organization, so that it didn’t get in the way.

So we talked about how Zhang Ruimin is an architect, but really what he’s been doing is taking the barriers out rather than putting them in. It’s been, in a sense, reverse architecture because it’s been enabling people to be able to become more successful.

I think that when we deal with managers of large companies, not necessarily Haier, but large companies in general, we talk about the Haier experience. They often think about their own internal problems - why they can’t do this, whether it’s true work council restrictions or whatever the reason is. But in fact, I think what happens at Haier is they’ve put their workforce in a position now where it thinks first about the customer, the outside stuff, and then begins to draw the changes to be able to more effectively meet the customer.

Whereas in Europe, in the United States, the response, because of tradition, has been, “Let’s think about all the internal reasons we can’t do it before we even begin thinking about the customer.” So I think a lot of it is mindset, a lot of it is changing the way in which people prioritize inside-outside and then what gets adjusted to what. In Qingdao, clearly people start by thinking outside and then adjust the inside to fit, whereas what I’ve seen in so many of the people that I work with is that they think first of all about inside and then try to figure out how they can adjust the outside, which is the wrong way to go.

Bill: Well, if I can add just a couple of reflections more into the nuance of clashing of culture, so the West and the East. I think one interesting point of Haier when they take over existing companies, as in the works of Zhang Ruimin himself, he said once to me that they don’t helicopter management in. They don’t bring the management from China, which is fairly common when Chinese companies are taking over European companies.

So basically, what they do, they normally focus on three key aspects. They focus on first of all, essentially becoming market-driven, so having this micro-enterprise architecture, so becoming profit and loss-driven. So you need to have your profit and loss, you need to be sustainable from an entrepreneurial perspective.

Then they focus on setting what they call the “leading goals” - so being above average, basically. And third, they focus on this idea that you need to really unlock the people’s potential. So you really need to make it easy for them to show their leadership and so on.

So these are the three pillars, it’s a kind of simplification of Haier culture. It’s like a simplified version that you can apply - microenterprises, profit and loss, setting leading goals, being above average, being leaders on the market, becoming the number one, and unlocking people’s potential. This is the simplified version that you can use.

And of course, there will be challenges because China and the West, they are different. They are different in many, many ways. And one, I think the most important way we are different is - well, actually two ways. One is our ethic of work that is completely different. Of course, we spoke about Taoism. If we think about the difference between the Taoist approach, which is mostly focused on this idea of doing by not doing, managing by not managing, and instead you look into the traditional ethic of work in the West that has created the Western bureaucracy, which is very much structured, controlled way of work, there is a radical difference.

Another difference I think is really important to spot is the perception of modernity that we have in the West and the East. To some extent, I think in the West, we already, most of our workers already perceive the failure of capitalism to some extent, the failure of modernity. So we are living post-modern, post-post-modern societies, while in China, they still believe the capitalists can make it. They still believe that we can come up with a techno-political utopia that can manage society in a way that is enduring.

So you kind of have a very enthusiastic, capitalist society on one end - China - and in the West, you have this now kind of confused, post-post-modern society. And it’s going to be hard for us to go to cast to employees in a Western organization and tell them, “You can become entrepreneurial.” People don’t buy this anymore, I think.

So I think even if RenDanHeYi was born in China, I think moving, bringing it to Europe, it can really help us now to find the synthesis and to bring these ways of organizing beyond just creating the next user experience. And I think it’s really going to be an interplay of European culture and Chinese culture. If we can really achieve this sweet spot of these two cultures trying to think about the organization and the purpose of the organization up today in the modern world, then, you know, that is going to provide us a sweet spot for really understanding what the organization of the future is about.

Bill: I think it’s kind of interesting. When I listen to Simone, I agree with what he says completely. I think it’s kind of interesting that we traditionally have this culture in the West of being independent and the culture in China, in particular, being collective. And yet the behaviors that we’re seeing in Haier is, in a sense, almost the reverse of what we see in the Western analogs.

I think that when we look at what Haier has been trying to do with General Electric in the US, and I think even what we’ve seen with Haier Europe as well, when you give people the prospects of really using what they know and having autonomy to do that, they become fascinated by it. It becomes energizing, and you begin to see very imaginative responses. So I think that I’m very hopeful that when Haier is transferring the RenDanHeYi model to its associates in the West, I think it’ll be a different interpretation. I don’t think it’ll look exactly the same, but I think it’ll be an interpretation that generates energy, enthusiasm, imagination. I mean, I think we’ll see revitalized organizations as a result of this.

Lisa: Yeah, I hope so because it’s funny that I think about Semco and also like people like James Carlson from Scandinavian Airlines back in the 80s and 90s saying, “The people closest to the customer need the power to make decisions” and so on. And it never really took off. So perhaps it will be an example like Haier, this kind of Chinese, incredible sort of giant and success story that might, as you say, revitalize an interest in that, and for people to think, “Oh, actually, maybe there’s something in this.”

I think also perhaps the technology aspect as well, because I know Haier and also organizations like Buurtzorg are using technology as a way of kind of decentralizing, in a way of kind of being able to get rid of a lot of the management functions because you can automate a lot of things and use technology to really empower people to do things that perhaps previously managers might have done. So yeah, hopefully, it will inspire.

Bill: I’m interested in how Simone would react to this, but I think that Haier has not used technology to replace managers. I think that there was a large exit of managers in the early 2000s, but that was because they changed the organizational structure, and they gave managers the opportunity - middle managers the opportunity - to figure out how they could contribute to the organizations. And my understanding is some decided that they would rather be middle managers somewhere else than go through that trouble.

But I think that the other thing that has happened at Haier is that Haier has not only changed the organizational structure and the power within the organization, but they’ve also changed the distribution of wealth. So in Haier, the way that value is distributed makes it economically worthwhile or rewarding, economically rewarding, for people who are inclined to take these chances.

And when I think about your examples, John Carlson and then also you had ABB doing things like this, and Oticon in Denmark… When I think back about those things, they changed the organization, they gave people autonomy, but they didn’t necessarily change the way in which rewards were distributed. And I think Haier has done that. What do you think, Simone?

Simone: Well, I think technology in Haier is being used to destroy the organization, not really to destroy bureaucracy only. I think Haier has been already accepting the idea that - again, it’s no culture - so they are really destroying the bureaucracy. They really try to take bureaucracy out of the picture. So take pointless micromanagement, all these incentives that Bill speaks about are all about, “We’re going to take these lagging out of the picture and just put incentives in place.”

And in the process, accidentally, they are potentially canceling the centralized organization. So when you speak with Zhang Ruimin, he will tell you, “Maybe companies will stay like enterprises, but organizations will disappear.” So the question now is, it really starts to be really hard now to understand what is Haier, what is not. For example, now they are investing in companies that are technically outside of it.

So of course, there are some elements that make the organization. For example, these platforms that internally give services and so on. But the same platforms have been, are being transformed into being entrepreneur units. So they are kind of being unbundled by the organization again. So it’s a continuous unbundling that is made possible by technology.

Now with this smart contracts, for example, this is a crazy available addition that they’ve been doing in the last year. The ecosystem micro-community, ecosystem micro-community is a new organizational artifact that is almost entirely possible just because there is a technology that makes it possible. So smart contracts in this case. So again, our technology is being used to introduce a new organizational artifact that is not even an artifact. It’s just a technologically powered way to make contracts. But it’s just, you know, the way we use technology is… The EMC doesn’t exist. It’s just a technology. It’s just a contract.

So I find it really fascinating the way that they are using technology to, again, in the same perspective, let’s get rid of anything that is not purposeful, is not useful for what we want to achieve. And so, so that’s the role of technology, I think, in this organization. It’s really about transcending the organization. I think, most of all, Haier is one of the few organizations in the world that I know that is deliberately thinking about transcending the organization as a concept.

Bill: So the opposite of centralization is not necessarily decentralization, right, which is what they’re doing. But I sort of see the technology part as an enabler, that the technology makes it easier to do these things. But it’s not… but people are not abdicating their role in imagining the future and driving the organization forward and, you know, in enthusing others to join with them.

Lisa: That’s interesting. I’m sort of thinking about the future and imagining possibilities if you follow the next logical step, perhaps there isn’t one, of this evolution. But one thing that a couple of things that kind of trouble me or questions that I have - one of them, I know that you brought up, Simone, when you were interviewing Zhang Ruimin recently about sustainability and thinking about the planet.

And the other one is, you know, a few years ago, I went to visit a small, very small organization in the UK called Matt Black Systems, who has a kind of a micro version of the Haier model, I suppose, but they are micro-enterprises of one person almost, in the aerospace industry. And the owner there said to me that he was worried about the types of people that were able to work in these sorts of organizations, you know, the types of people that you’ve just been describing, people who are entrepreneurial, who are able to take initiative, you know, all of these things.

And as Haier grows, it’s such a large organization, and they’re, as you said, already investing in and acquiring other organizations, one question I have is, you know, are we creating a class of people who won’t be useful in the world of work if all organizations, perhaps not all, but if many start to go in this direction? And then coupled with that, AI and things like that - who knows? But is there a risk of having a kind of un-diverse workforce, in a sense, that only highly capable, entrepreneurial types will really thrive in this kind of environment?

Simone: That’s a good question. I think, Bill, I want to… I will offer one just one quick reflection, then I’ll leave it to you. You know, to some extent, I mean, I feel like Haier is just becoming smarter and more efficient at capitalism than any other companies in the world. And capitalism means also technology. So essentially, it’s the place on Earth, probably the organization on Earth at the moment, where capitalism and technology are playing at their most highest potential.

So the problem with technology, we know it very well, we know the question concerning technology since ages. Philosophers all over the world have been talking about that. And so the question is - the risk is that you just create an organization that is smarter at destroying the planet, basically.

But to some extent, I also, I can also see in Haier, I can also see some interesting seeds of transcending organization, as I said. So in the same culture that you have, it’s the same culture that is about making new customer experiences all the time. There is also the seed for independence and interdependence.

For example, once I, one person asked me, “I would be more excited about Haier if they weren’t doing a smart home, but more about something like sustainability.” And so I said, “You know, maybe a smart home is a sustainable home to some extent.”

So there’s another example where employees from Haier were working on water purifiers, and there is an anecdote on the website that mentions that when they were working with communities about the quality of water, they figured out that the quality of the water doesn’t just depend on the purifier. It depends on many other systemic aspects.

So I think, you know, that’s the point. There are some seeds in how Haier is making people self-organized, making entrepreneurs emerge, and letting go of the control from the center. And this idea that you just need to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of a corporate has the seeds to transcend the industrial organization. We don’t know how yet, but I believe that this question of how we transcend modernity is an open question, not just for Haier. It’s an open question for our civilization. And Haier is one place where I see a potential to start to see some sparks of how we really transcend the industrial organization and modernity into something that goes beyond.

Now, it’s a really specific philosophy, and it’s all about being confused. It’s all about being confused about the future and being confused about what to do and being happy with it. It’s about flowing. It’s about when Zhang Ruimin in the interview says, “Our future is being like water, it’s being selfless.” It’s really about kind of surfing with what’s going on.

And Alicia Hennig, in this beautiful paper called “Daoism in Management,” she speaks about this, and she says, “This is not going to give us many answers in terms of how we create sustainable corporations.” But the question is really that this kind of culture, it’s not about giving you an answer. It’s much more about flowing with what organization is going to be and creating organizations that can cope with this change and be resilient to reconfigure themselves to adapt to an unpredictable world that we seem to be living today.

Bill: My response would be that Haier has… Haier is very small relative to the total population of organizations around the planet, most of which are organized around traditional command and control types of structures with a goal of reducing variance, getting the surprises out of whatever happens in order to be more efficient.

What I find so interesting about Haier is that it’s creating an organization where variance enlargement is very much at the core of what they’re doing. So they’re putting surprises back in. And if you think about what we’ve learned during the present COVID-19 virus, one of the things that’s certainly important is we need fast-moving, on-the-ground thinking that’s more imaginative. The COVID-19 virus crisis is a crisis of leadership imagination.

And what I think that the Haier model is doing is encouraging more leadership imagination throughout the organization, not just relying on the top as before. But also, there’s a great deal of locality in it. So as we see, I think, one of the things we’re going to come out of this crisis is rediscovering that buying local and supporting the local is a good idea for a lot of reasons, not just economic reasons, but because it’s a good idea to support the community.

And my sense is that the way in which Haier is structured and the ease with which three colleagues can come up with an idea and try and form a micro-enterprise to pursue this is really wonderful. Because none of them are going to propose a micro-enterprise that says, “Let’s have a command and control structure and have 70,000 people listen to a guy at the top.” It’s all going to be - they’re all product-oriented or market-oriented initiatives.

But the way in which they work is fundamentally different. So they’re expressing themselves both in terms of the output but also in the throughput. The throughput’s different, and it’s no longer as linear, as sequential as traditional value chains are. I think there’s a lot of promise for the future in the Haier model.

The problem is Haier is one of a handful of companies around the world that are experimenting with this. So what impact will this experience have? I don’t know - not enough. And so my hope is that if there’s a revolution within the workforce, it becomes one about seeking out more autonomy and more leadership.

But earlier, Lisa, you mentioned the Toyota experience in North America. The Toyota experience in North America was sincerely interested in pushing responsibility throughout the organization, but the workforce was not prepared to accept that. And what I worry about is when the Haier model gets transferred, will there be acceptance of engagement, or will there be reticence and fear over being visible and therefore vulnerable?

Lisa: Well, that’s what I wonder as well. And I think about Mickey Cashton, who I had on the podcast, and she talked about that there needs to be, as well as structural shifts or redesigning the organization, there need to be two shifts within. And one is the people who have power or have previously had power - in this case, managers. And the other is in people who don’t have power or historically haven’t had power, you know, employees.

So like you said, in that example, if employees - so to speak, it’s an outdated word even in itself - but if people aren’t, even if you give permission, but if people are so conditioned to being passive, which they are to a large degree in the world of work, and waiting and passing the buck or complaining upwards or whatever, I think it takes quite a lot to provide the conditions for them to really explore and learn this new way of working and being and relating to each other.

And it seems like in Haier, at least, that that has been facilitated by architecting the organization in a very particular way in all of the facets that we’ve just talked about that kind of help bend people towards that kind of way of behaving. And I imagine, you know, those people who have been in Haier in China, at least who have not been recruited into the latest version of it, have kind of evolved with the organization. So it’ll be interesting to see those people who haven’t kind of come up in that world over in China, fresh from the source, so to speak, the challenges that they’ll face in really kind of unlearning and learning this new way.

Bill: My sense, I’m trying to think as you talk, I’m trying to think of people that I’ve… the people that I know. And so one of the things is for sure, the people who run the micro-enterprises, quite a number of those people have come from outside of Haier. And I think in the course of one week, I interviewed 10 or 14 of these micro-enterprise owners, and there were no two career paths in common. It was all about who had a good idea and could gather support for it.

And my sense is that those people were refreshed by the opportunity to run unencumbered with their own idea at their own risk, to some extent - I mean, it’s not a free ride - and see if it would work or not. I don’t think the way in which the Haier culture works is that if you join the organization, no matter whether you’re joining as a young, first-time employee or a mid-career transition, it comes as a bit of a jolt that all of a sudden, you have a lot more freedom than would probably be ever experienced before in your professional life.

And so if you think about the broader ecosystem which Haier exists, we don’t do a very good job in the educational training world preparing people for this. We prepare them for the historical model, which is a lot more constrained. So it will be interesting. My hope is that we recognize the tremendous potential that’s available within human ingenuity, and we go about creating mechanisms to free it up. And I think Haier is one way to do that. RenDanHeYi is one way to do that.

Simone: I don’t have much to add on this point specifically, so I will leave it to you.

Lisa: I guess I’m always coming back to like, how do you help people to be successful? Because I can imagine if you’re coming, whatever industry you’re coming from, when you’re entering into Haier, chances are you’ve had an experience of a traditional top-down organization. Or perhaps, you know, often it’s the case with these kinds of organizations that the people who really thrive are people who are either young and don’t have much experience of traditional kind of management bureaucracy kind of stuff, or they’ve come from some other context which is sort of so different that they’re not kind of porting over any of those learned habits.

But for those who join Haier who have had that kind of context, I just wonder if they’re… if they get any support, other than or sort of training, or other particular skills or tools or things that help them with that jolt, so to speak.

Bill: So I think nobody winds up at Haier by chance. I don’t think you have anybody who’s unsuspecting and thinks, “Whoa, where did I, how did I get here?” They, the brand, the employer brand is so strongly entrepreneurial that people know what they’re getting into. But Simone has a scheme that talks about architecting and powering and enabling, which I think really addresses your question very effectively.

Simone: Yeah, I mean, in general, I think I feel like Haier has eliminated a lot of the boundaries between inside and outside. So, you know, for example, if we make the comparison between Zappos and Haier, both of these companies are using micro-enterprises structures. Of course, the Zappos is much more immature, let’s say, with respect to Haier. And both of them are all about self-management. But Zappos has a traditional hiring process.

So for example, to be hired in Zappos, you go through three months training, and then if at the end of the training, they feel like you’re not culturally fit, you’ll be fired, you know, just right after training. And then if you fit, you get your bonus, your side band, and then you can create maybe part of your bonuses through that, you know, the holacracy.

When it comes to Haier, you get… I think it’s easy to be hired, to some extent, you know. Because if in China, your side bank is… the basic income is set by the state, set by the policy. So then if you don’t find an opportunity in three months, you’re out. But when you enter the system, so maybe you can be hired by micro-enterprise at first, but you are not there just to work in a micro-enterprise. You are there because you can leverage on the systems that Haier has created to let you become an entrepreneur.

So it’s kind of a system that offers you several things. It offers you what they call the shared service platforms - so legal, IT, HR, and so on. But also offers you what the industry platforms do. So it’s a step-by-step investment process that makes it supposedly easier to enterprise inside the organization if you’re passionate about the Internet of Things and technology and et cetera, than outside.

So it’s really a system of very porous… It’s a very porous organization that you can imagine as a kind of accelerator. You end up inside this accelerator if you are attracted by the culture. Easily you can be out in three months. So you can really get the spin and become a leader if there is this seed of leadership in yourself, and you have an overlap with the culture, you can easily be caught into this rapidly spinning machine and become a leader and create your micro-enterprise and get your enterprise to IPO in, you know, three years.

Like when you think about these guys creating the Thunder Robot micro-enterprise, this is a company making gaming PCs inside a giant organization that used to make washing machines. So it’s really about creating something that is easy to jump in, and then you can get into the spin. Otherwise, if you don’t, you’re out in three months. If nobody wants to work with you, and you don’t find your place in the organization, you’re out.

So I think it also depends on the policies that the organization operates within. It’s a completely different world. China is not, of course, it’s not the same compliance rules that you may have when you run an organization in the US or even in Europe, even worse, I would say, in Europe. But now when there are all these constraints on hiring and finding an employee and so on.

Lisa: That’s interesting. It’s sort of much more, it’s very transparent criteria from the beginning that yeah, if you don’t generate more than your basic income…

Simone: Yeah, the system, it’s kind of self-correcting.

Lisa: Right.

Simeone: I told you, this is a company that is really based on this idea of zero. And again, I come back to this idea of, like, and maybe it’s because I’m thinking through my worldview, and I’m someone that, you know, I have a drama background. So when I used to audition for plays, you would get one type of director that would try and challenge you in the audition straight away and put you on edge and make you uncomfortable and get you to do something kind of radical. And then you get a different kind of director that would be much more kind of supportive and collaborative and asking you what do you think and try this and give you feedback and so on, which takes a bit longer, you could say.

So I’m thinking about, and maybe it’s because I’m not the ideal employee for Haier, right? But again, I think about this diversity question that I mentioned earlier about, you know, in some ways, it feels kind of harsh, right, that only a certain type of person will survive that. And I wonder if there are some people that need just a little bit more and then could really thrive that aren’t really catered for by that system. So it’s not a criticism, but it’s kind of a wondering that I have.

Bill: I think that if you’re one of those people that needs a little bit more time and you wind up in Haier, as long as you demonstrate right energy and commitment and curiosity, you’ll get the extra time. I mean, the goal is not for everybody to run a micro-enterprise. I think that would be an interesting goal, and I think many people come to Haier with that as their objective.

But I also think that, you know, if you get hired into a micro-enterprise, the beauty of that is that you’re - assuming the micro-enterprise survives - your performance review is not on KPIs, and it’s not on an abstracted common score sheet, but it’s the impressions of the eight or nine or ten people you work with as to how committed you are, how energized you were, you know, how much of a colleague you were.

So in a sense, you know, in a sense, you gave the spectrum of directors in drama. I mean, my sense is that Haier’s a mix of both of those. There are absolutely clear-cut success and failure criteria. And at the same time, there’s a lot of ambiguity in between on an individual basis. So I think that, Simone says no, I believe that’s absolutely true, but the way in which you define the subjectivity can be debated endlessly, right?

So we can tell pretty objectively whether the micro-enterprise is succeeding or not, whether it survives or not. That’s clear-cut and fairly draconian in the way in which it operates. But on the other hand, there’s the capacity, I think, a greater capacity to understand the capability and potential of an individual because you’re in a small group setting, you’re in a team setting, and your evaluations are based on a holistic impression rather than… So my sense is that there’s a little bit of both.

Simone: Yeah, yeah. I think one thing I can add is that, you know, if you are used to working in a small company - for example, I’m an entrepreneur, I have this small company, I run this company with others - and as an entrepreneur, you know that you need to pour in some asymmetric contribution. So it’s not going to be A plus B equals C. It’s like, you know, you do all the work, and then you get all the rewards. You kind of put all yourself into what you’re doing.

And this is something that is easy to achieve on a small scale. I think this company is figuring out the way how to make it work on a large scale. Just create a context where you can really put all of yourself into what you’re doing. And when you put all of yourself as a team, for example, and everybody is depending on each other, putting all of themselves into becoming number one, for example, then you generate this kind of dynamics where everybody looks after each other. But as soon as you become a bureaucrat, you’re out.

That’s it. You know, you cannot become a bureaucrat in this organization. There’s no way you can hide your debt, your commitment, your technological debt, or your organizational debt. It’s just too transparent, it’s just too committed, it’s just too entrepreneurial.

And at some extent, I think this really resonates with the way, as an entrepreneur, I see an organization. I don’t want to hire a bureaucrat. I want to hire an entrepreneur. Of course, you cannot hire an entrepreneur if you don’t have skin in the game, if you’re not part of something that somehow makes the space for you to put this entrepreneurial, asymmetric effort into becoming, putting all of yourself into making something happen.

I know that today, for those that, for example, are into collective management and collaborative decision-making, all the stories that we have been telling us for decades - and some of them are true for sure, some of them can be designed, for example. But I think we often fail to acknowledge that making the space and making a space for people to really, you know, put 100% of themselves into making something happen - as much as this sounds really, this old story of creating a deal startup, that’s how it works. You need to put yourself into something and create something new.

And this is basically what Haier is trying to do on a large scale. And to do it at a large scale, it’s a matter of designing the right pieces and putting the right pieces together - the services and the EMC and the culture - so that this can really happen on a large scale.

Bill: And so, Lisa, if you go back to this person you mentioned who has in the aerospace industry who has a small firm with people and micro-enterprises of one or so, I think Simone and I have recently become fascinated by the idea of actually doing that. That better to have one or two people in a micro-enterprise than have one or two people in a small bureaucracy, right?

So we’ve been in conversations with three or four different groups about the wisdom of saying, starting right from the beginning and saying, “Look, I have an organization, we have five people, we’re going to have two micro-enterprises.” Sounds a little weird, but I think that it works.

The other thing I have to say, as someone who’s not as young as you two, is that when I go around and talk to entrepreneurs, not Haier, but entrepreneurs, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen or wherever, there’s a uniformity there in the message that they send, in the clothes that they wear, in the way in which they stand, and the lingo that they use, that I also find sort of worrisome. I mean, I think that homogeneity of any type is probably undesirable.

And as much as I envy their opportunities and their energy and their commitment, after a while, I feel like I’m in yet another rendition of the same show. So I think that what you don’t want is you don’t want too much homogeneity going into the future. And my sense is that so far in Haier, given the breadth of the platform orientations on which these micro-enterprises are embedded, that there’s quite a bit of variety in terms of not only what they’re doing but the people who are doing it. So I’m optimistic about that.

Lisa: Thank you for sharing that. That’s clarifying because I think I sometimes look at examples like Haier, and it can feel - I don’t know, this is reductive to say - but it can feel quite masculine, I suppose, as a concept. And I’m always looking for the kind of relational human pieces. And I think they are there, but it’s, I think, perhaps less written about.

You know, people are, it’s such a complex model. When I’ve read about the RenDanHeYi model, I read a book about it, and it was this huge book going, breaking down the whole diagram of the model. And it’s like, “Wow, like too much for my brain to comprehend.” But yeah, the pieces that I often zoom in on are like, where are the bits where it’s like… because I think it’s because I’m driven by more human workplaces, ultimately. But what you share about that, really, if you start from this idea of a micro-enterprise of one or two or three people, that people have the freedom completely to design their own organization, and of course, people aren’t going to design bureaucracies. So it is kind of incredibly liberating in that sense, but there is a risk, right? So, you know, so this is, it’s an organization that’s demanding as well in terms of results.

Simone: I think to welcome your point, Lisa, for example, if you look at the masculine and all these topics that you spoke about, you know, sometimes, for example, there is a lot of talking about non-violent communication. And I think you touched this topic also with Peter Koenig when you spoke about the source. But to some extent, sometimes I personally feel like I am the one person that normally is also sometimes violent in the communication when I work with the teams. And I feel like sometimes when I’m forced, for example, to comply with a bureaucratic process or with lots of pointless cycles of communication, I feel like I feel the outward violence, you know.

So sometimes, I think having an organization that removes all the formality, that makes it easy for you to become an entrepreneur, it’s a way to be much less violent towards the employee. So when you speak about a masculine organization talking about Haier, I think here is where Taoism can help. Because there is a different type of thinking, it’s dyadic, it is a way of thinking where you can always put all the nuances together.

So there cannot be a masculine organization if it’s not also feminine. And this is more or less what Haier is doing, you know, to some extent. It’s masculine telling you, “You need to be entrepreneurial.” But on the other side, there is also feminine in a way that creates the space for you to be entrepreneurial and in a way that makes everybody, for example, connected in achieving the same objective, depending on each other, like water would do, you know, like Zhang Ruimin mentioned in the interview.

So I think it requires us to go beyond this idea of there is A and B, that is black and white, there is masculine and feminine, and asks us to really think about the dyadic thinking, where all these phases of one concept are all together into one. And that’s why I say this organization is at the same time potentially accelerating towards destruction and keeping the seeds for transcending these at the same time. So I think this is really the nature of this organization.

Lisa: That’s really interesting. I’m wondering, as a way of kind of wrapping up this conversation, I imagine you get asked a lot when you’re giving talks or when you’re sharing what you’re learning about Haier with people, that people ask you, you know, what are some practical or actionable insights that we can take from the Haier model?

So people listening to this podcast tend to be people who are interested in self-management or in more decentralized ways of working, or people who are already experimenting themselves or perhaps in a self-managing organization, or maybe they’re in a totally bureaucratic public sector organization and wanting some kind of antidote or some lifeline. So yeah, I realize it’s a difficult question to ask, but if you would share like one or two kind of pearls of wisdom with listeners, what would they be, Simone?

Simone: You want me to start on this one?

Lisa: Yeah.

Simone: Well, I can say, I think that it’s never too late to really become entrepreneurial. That’s one point, truly. I acknowledge that creativity is a metric. You need to again, you need to put all of yourself into something to create something new. And you know, you cannot have a clear path, an algorithm to evaluate how much of yourself you put into something because the outcomes are intangible. The outcomes are impossible to, you know, codify. So you need to acknowledge this if you really want to create an organization that creates this space.

And another thing I want to, I can say is that really, it’s time to get rid of bureaucracies. It’s time to get rid of all these… as David… now, Graeber, I think. Yeah, the British anthropologist, you can help me with that. But “bullshit jobs,” you know, David Graeber calls it.

So it’s really about, I think, accepting it and taking over bureaucracy in a serious way, not just speaking about removing bureaucracy. It’s just about acknowledging that bureaucracy needs to be eliminated in an age of pervasive technology, zero transaction costs. You know, it’s no more the industrial age. We are beyond that, and we need to acknowledge it in our organizations.

Bill: And to that, I would add that you really have to, it’s not enough to want to create an organization that’s different. It’s got to be, there’s got to be a business model, if you will, that thrives on that. So somehow, you’ve got to make it important as a commercial objective or as a mission objective that you have this autonomy.

And then you need to, I think, do a couple other things. One is make decisions that get the organism, the present organization, out of the way of those who are pursuing this commercial objective by having more autonomy. So you got to make it easier for them, not harder. The idea is not for this to be a sacrifice, but for this to be something that’s important enough that we’re going to change the organization.

And then that becomes complicated because every organization has a present and a future, and you’ve got to manage both simultaneously. And what we’re talking about, I think, lends itself more to a future, to where we want to build, we want to enlarge variance rather than reduce it. We want to get away from that cost-price-based competition, and we want to create, you know, surprise within the marketplace.

And I think that the, so you got to make it important in terms of the mission of the organization. You’ve got to get the existing organization out of the way, especially if you’re talking about future orientation. And the third thing is, I think, you’ve got to create some type of equity in the distribution of rewards so that people are recognized not only organizationally but also financially for what they’re doing and the contributions that they make.

And I think that Simone’s right, you’re never too old to do this. But you got to make it, you know, you got to… I was thinking, where I work, we have a system very similar. We have no departments, we have no structure, we have everybody has the same base salary. I’ve had the same base salary for 20 years. But income differences are big, depending on how you run small micro-enterprises, which turn out to be program projects.

And my sense is that that works great. People, we love it because we’re, you know, we don’t have tenure. We’ve all given up lifetime commitments in other schools, and this is a very entrepreneurial way to work. But it’s also very rewarding, both professionally but also financially as well. And I think that those sorts of things, that’s what I see in Haier. I see the same sort of mechanism working there.

And I, I see it in Simone. So if I, the other thing, the last thing I would add is for me, the biggest change in my life over the last two years is working with this guy and watching how the canvases he creates, which I think if managers are really interested about this, really brings them in and lets them understand the managerial choices they have to make and the consequences of those choices, which is really wonderful because it’s a guided conversation. And then the other thing is the way he works. So he exemplifies what we’ve talked about just now.

Simone: Well, it’s thanks, Bill. I think maybe, Lisa, it’s good to mention that the work we have been doing with Bill in the last year and a half is being open-sourced. So most of the people that will be listening to your show will find a way to, on our website, and we can give you the links for your show notes, to download the canvases that Bill is talking about, with the glossary and the user guide that we are creating and we will be updating in the coming months for sure.

Bill: Well, I’m absolutely fascinated by this very analytical approach to thinking about subjective choices. It’s really changed the way I think about how to put these organizations together.

Lisa: And I think it’s, I think it’s also quite a unique thing that Haier is doing in terms of opening up to outsiders like you and asking outsiders to sort of teach this, right, and to make it open source. I think that’s also quite a remarkable thing.

Bill: It would take their philosophy and bring it into new colleagues.

Simone: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s extraordinary, yeah.

Lisa: And on that note, thank you to you both for sharing so generously your time and your ideas and what you’re learning. And I learned a lot from this conversation, so it’s been really enjoyable for me to kind of have this case study brought to life by two people who have really been there and met people and been immersed in it. So thank you so much.

Bill: Thank you for inviting us.

Simone: Well, it was a pleasure and an honor to be on this show that I’m listening to since a while. So thank you, thank you for inviting us.